The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-And-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors (27 page)

Over and over you will find that land records untie the knotty problems that other records cannot untangle. Never overlook their value when reconstructing your own family's history.

T
wo men named James Harvey Glenn, one born in 1846, the other in 1848, were buried in Monmouth City Cemetery, Warren County, Illinois, a town currently of only ten thousand people. One survived the Civil War and had several children; the other died at age eighteen from an illness while serving in the Union Army. He neither married nor had children. One of them is my cousin. Which one?

Two men named Michael Hoffman lived in Butler County, Pennsylvania, in 1850; each was born in 1836 and each married a woman named Mary. One is the son of Jacob, and one the son of Casper — but which is which and which is my great-grandfather? Two men named George R. Brown, three named Nathan Brown, three named John Brown, and four named James Brown all lived in Israel Township, Preble County, Ohio, in the 1820s and 1830s. They were all members of the same Presbyterian Church. Are they members of the same family? If so, how are they related, and which one is my ancestor?

These are just a few of the problems of sorting individuals of the same name I have encountered in my genealogical research. Working on each of these problems, I have become intrigued by the difficulty of establishing identities for two or more individuals living in the same place at the same time. I have found it to be a difficult but very common problem.

The first time I fell into one of these genealogical pits occurred early in my research, while I was looking for the father of Michael Hoffman, my paternal great-grandfather. It was only after a trip to the county of his residence that was I able to identify my Michael Hoffman as the son of Casper Hoffman rather than Jacob Hoffman, to whom I had originally assigned him. In the process of sorting them out, I obtained a considerable amount of information on the
other
Hoffman family, including locating their ancestral home in Germany and identifying the maiden name of Michael's immigrant mother — no small task, I assure you. I truly thought I had the right family, but because there were confusing contradictions, I kept wondering, “Is this right? It doesn't
quite
fit.” Finally, nagging questions forced me to admit that I was just trying to explain too much. I had found a lot of blue pieces of my jigsaw puzzle, so to speak, but what looked to me like sky turned out to be ocean instead.

So, I convinced my husband that the garden spot of the western world was located just north of Pittsburgh in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and that that was where we should spend our next vacation. I learned two very significant things on that trip. First, I learned that more productive research can be accomplished when you have personal access to a wide range of primary records. By looking at signatures on documents in the Butler County courthouse, examining church records, and locating family groups in cemeteries, I was able — without much difficulty — to establish that my great-grandfather was the son of Casper rather than Jacob Hoffman.

The other important thing I learned on that trip was the value of researching communities rather than just individuals. I had become so enmeshed in the problem of identical names — especially since Hoffman is such a common German name, and there were so many families in that area who shared it — that I had not looked at the bigger picture.
I had not placed each man in his own community and culture to learn about him as a person.
I had not studied the geography well enough. I had not studied the history of churches the families belonged to. I had not studied how their different communities developed. If I had, I do not think I would have stayed confused for so long.

The communities where Jacob and Casper Hoffman lived were on opposite ends of the county:one in Cranberry Township on the west, the other straddling the townships of Summit and Clearfield on the east. One church was Roman Catholic with typical architecture, a cloister, and a cemetery with typically Catholic tombstones; the other was Lutheran Reformed and considerably different in form and appearance. One community had been settled in the 1830s, primarily by immigrants from Baden, the other in the late 1840s by immigrants from Hesse and Alsace-Lorraine. The houses looked different, the surnames of the neighbors were different, even the contemporary restaurant food was different! The two Michael Hoffmans shared nothing but a common name. This was my introduction to the genealogical dilemma of the name is the same.

The problem of sorting out people with identical names plagues every genealogist at some time. No matter how unusual the name, it seems that more than one person always bears it. Yet, the problem can be solved more easily than you might think if you examine enough records and do not jump to conclusions before the evidence warrants it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Nature never rhymes her children, nor does she make two men alike.” No individual wants to be confused with another. All of us want the world to recognize our uniqueness, so we do our best to let others know exactly who we are. Our ancestors felt the same way, and found various means of distinguishing themselves in their communities. To sort out individuals of the same name, we must study the traces that each left behind. By carefully analyzing each clue we find in documents, cemeteries, published histories, and other sources, we can reconstruct the lives of the people who created them, and glean enough information to separate those with identical names.

Figure 8-1
Map of Butler County, Pennsylvania. The stars indicate where the two Michael Hoffmans resided.

Below are five common mistakes made by genealogists attempting to sort out individuals with the same name.

1. CONNECTING AN EVENT OR RELATIONSHIP
(such as birth, marriage, death, or military service) to an individual for no reason except that the name is the same. This is the pit we fall into most often and with the most serious consequences. Many genealogists do not seem to realize that our hardest task is to be absolutely sure that a particular document or event pertains to the specific individual we are researching.

A common example is linking a certain man and woman because you have found a marriage record showing his name and her given name. For many years, published secondary sources held that William Upham, born 1747, of Newton, Massachusetts, was married to Lydia Jackson, born 1756.A marriage did occur between
a
William Upham and a Lydia Jackson in 1774, but the man involved was William Upham, born 1723 — the other William Upham's father. In other words, the published genealogies had the younger William Upham married to his stepmother, his father's second wife.

It's easy to see how the confusion occurred. William Upham III (the man born in 1747) was closer to Lydia Jackson's age than his father was, but primary documents show that the son's first wife, Ann, had not died, and that she continued to release her dower on deeds long after the elder William Upham was creating deeds with a wife named Lydia. Obviously, the compilers of those published genealogies made assumptions without examining enough crucial documents.

Another problem that entered into this situation was the use of the terms
senior
and
junior
, which in colonial times referred to any elder and younger men of the same name rather than father and son. In this case, there were three generations of men named William Upham. Each of the elder two had changed his name from junior to senior when the older man died. This confounded researchers, who prolonged the confusion by failing to check when the deeds were
created
rather than when they were
recorded
. From the records, it would appear that William Upham Sr. was making deeds after he had died, because by the time the deeds were recorded, the younger William Upham had assumed that title and was creating his own records.

2. NEGLECTING TO SEARCH RECORDS THOROUGHLY AND SYSTEMATICALLY.
The difference between ordinary researchers and excellent researchers is not in the records they locate, but in how they use them. Examine each record for the details it contains and assimilate those details completely. It is not enough just to extract names and dates. If you are already having problems with too many people of the same name, you must develop different strategies to distinguish those individuals. Learning to recognize those scraps of valuable information that can be pieced together to form a meaningful whole takes a critical eye and a patient mind. Too often researchers look only for obvious genealogical markers such as “my son” or “my dearest daughter, Susan, wife of Jesse Snopdewox” to establish a relationship. Even when you can find such phrases in a historical document, you must be sure they apply to the person you think they do.

3. MOVING TOO EAGERLY TO A PRECEDING GENERATION
before the latest generation has been fully explored. It is an axiom in genealogy that ancestry is too quickly sought; offspring not thoroughly studied. Whenever people ask me how to locate an ancestor's parents, the first question I ask them is, “Do you know who his brothers and sisters were?” Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the answer is no. Identifying the siblings, or at least some of them, is the first step in tracking backwards, and is crucial when dealing with individuals of the same name. How do you find those brothers and sisters? By studying your ancestor's associates, friends, and neighbors. The people with whom he is most likely to be involved throughout his lifetime are his extended family members.

4. RELYING ON SECONDARY SOURCES.
They are probably more confused than you are! Don't attempt to make conflicting data fit something that is already in print, or you may be making your job more difficult than it should be. Do your own work. Printed sources may lead you to some records, but when dealing with people whose names are the same, it is crucial to examine the primary documents yourself. Others may have missed valuable clues that could solve your particular mysteries.

5. DRAWING HASTY CONCLUSIONS BASED ON INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.
All of us are eager to solve our genealogical dilemmas. Too often, however, we do not examine enough sources to make absolutely certain that our conclusions are justified. It is unlikely that any one or two documents will provide enough evidence for a conclusion to be reached. This is particularly true when there is more than one person living in a given neighborhood at a given time bearing the same name.

Now that we have defined the errors we must avoid when dealing with identical names, let's look at the methodology for sorting out the individuals involved.

STEP 1:
Know your ancestor.

Before you go looking for his parents or place of origin, be certain that you have identified the person from whom you descend. If you discover several men of the same name in the next area of your search, stop! Go back to the previous community where you can positively place him, or move your research to a more recent time period when you are sure you can identify him in the records, then study him thoroughly. One of the red flags I should have suspected as I researched my Hoffman ancestors was that I
knew
how my grandparents felt about the Roman Catholic church. When the man I believed to be my ancestor only two generations before them turned out to be Roman Catholic, I should have suspected that he didn't belong to our family. Now, after twenty-five years of research experience, I would certainly recognize something like that as a red flag.

Too often, genealogists study names, not people. They collect reams of material on the births, marriages, and deaths of people with the same surname from every conceivable geographic location. But in order for that data to be meaningful, the names must be seen as representing
people
, and those people must be studied within their social context. Researchers must get to know the socioeconomic status, culture, lifestyle, religion, and political beliefs of their subjects to the greatest extent possible.

Once you are sure that you have found the man from whom you descend, look for his distinguishing characteristics: his brothers and sisters, his wife, his children, his in-laws, his age, his occupation, and his level of wealth and education. What did he tell you about himself? His name may be the same as someone else's, but he wasn't the same person.

Step 2:
Pinpoint his location.

It's amazing how quickly things can fall into place once you make that simple determination. If you just pull names from records and then try to fit them into family patterns, your research can become more confusing than it should be. Be sure you know the genealogy and formation of the counties you are researching, as well as any significant geographical features that might affect settlement patterns. I was amazed at how easy it was to distinguish between the various Franklin lines in Amherst County, Virginia, once I knew that a mountain separated several of the families.